Luc

I discovered this site because they wrote a JavaScript n-body gravity simulator as a side note for an article on iirc Cyclers. That’s the level of commitment I expect from a particularly dedicated space enthusiast, not a journalist! Especially when it’s not essential and a prominent piece in the story. Incredibly cool

They also have a podcast which I would recommend. Ain’t got no time to read the long pieces* but having them stories read to me while I’m cleaning the house? You bet!

• this is a lie; I read books for crying out loud

Why do lucky days come from replies with vowels in them?

Wait there's profile pictures? I just see usernames in the comment threads in Lemmy and that seems fine to me

Do you mean like a bass sound? Any idea what frequency?

As someone who can’t hear high pitches at all, I do recognise this funky bouncing of frequencies at the edge of my hearing range (probably around 15 kHz, I haven’t precisely measured it). It’s surprisingly hard to locate sound sources when you only hear them when you’re facing a certain angle in a certain spot in the room! These are always too quiet for my phone to pick up, so that’s no help sadly I wonder if there’d be a market for a variant of a phone model that is just all-round decent, but has a better microphone and other sensor upgrades. I run into the sensor limits a lot (probably weekly) but also don’t want to permanently run around with a bulky sensor board in my pocket :<

Probably related: apparently (some?) people can learn to use echolocation. Particularly useful for blind people of course, but I’ve read it’s too much effort and too limited compared to the alternative solutions so that it’s generally not considered worth pursuing. Naturally I had to try it myself: distinguishing the distance to one wall isn’t hard at all, at least coarsely; the difficulty seems to be in rapidly (while walking) finding smaller objects (especially ones that dampen sound), figuring out angles if you’re not facing or precisely perpendicular to a wall, and dealing with background noise With your superhuman hearing, maybe you’d enjoy casually learning to do this at some level and getting some use out of an unpleasant hearing sensitivity

All lights? Also battery-fed DC lights somehow?! I’m no expert but that seems strange I’ve caught a lot of lights and light-emitting displays flickering with the 980fps camera that’s built into my phone (best thing since sliced bread for a nerd like me), but also quite many lights appear solid. I’d imagine few have such high-frequency electronics that it pulses well beyond 1 kHz. Otherwise the sensor should sometimes capture a frame during a low or a peak As an example, I was recently looking at car lights in Germany, expecting to see duty cycling in most modern ones, but the majority (2/3rds or so) were actually solid so far as I could tell. A few cars had a mixture of flickering and solid lights in seemingly the same fixture. All flickering ones were high frequency though, not like 50 Hz as grid-fed lights do but much more. I didn’t bother with ffmpeg and counting frames but I estimated on the order of 250 Hz for one of them

You’re saying I can learn to see with my buttocks if one puts the right kind of lens in front of it and the light is sufficiently intense?

I definitely can’t hear high frequencies (I’m assuming due to ear infections as a child, feels mildly unfair that other people my age get to hear and understand conversations better but oh well) but coil whine is a thing for me as well. Had a router once that would whine depending on the network packet rate. My computer screen makes a noise when displaying large grids like a screen full of terminal text or a mostly blank spreadsheet. The led lights in my bathroom make a noise and I often turn them off while transacting my business. My Bluetooth headphones make similar noises depending on the connection state but that one is probably interference and not coil whine It happens at all frequencies. Although you don’t need to be able to hear special frequencies for it, of course you’ll hear it in more places if you have superlucg hearing ^^

Do you have an example of something you can make out that an average person probably can’t?